Ruling puts challengers back on ballot

So it appears there will be an election for Muscogee County sheriff after all.

As reported by staff writers Tim Chitwood and Mike Owen, Superior Court Judge Gary McCorvey has ruled that the Muscogee County elections board wrongly disqualified Republican candidate Mark LaJoye and Democratic candidate Donna Tompkins.

LaJoye and Tompkins, along with two other candidates, Pam Brown and Robert Keith Smith, both Democrats, were disqualified for what the elections board said were failures to meet deadlines.

But the circumstances were different, in that Brown and Smith failed to comply with a state law that requires fingerprinting for a criminal background check before a pre-primary deadline. In the case of LaJoye and Tompkins, the board ruled that they had failed to meet the same March 16 deadline for filing certified birth certificate copies and affidavits attesting that they are high school graduates.

Yet Tompkins, in a May 5 deposition challenging the disqualification, cited a March 11 email from the elections board saying she had qualified, and also asserting that on March 15, the day before the deadline, she was told by two board officials that her qualifying affidavit was “completed and fine.”

LaJoye’s attorney, Mark Shelnutt, recounted a similar experience on his client’s part, saying that on March 11, five days before the deadline, election workers had told both LaJoye and Muscogee County Republican Chairman Rick Allen that the candidate had satisfied all the requirements for eligibility to appear on the ballot.

Then the board later challenged, and disqualified, both candidates, leaving incumbent Sheriff John Darr, who will run as an independent in the November general election, effectively unopposed.

In his decision, McCorvey wrote that it is “the duty of the court to consider the results and consequences [and] not so construe a statute as will result in unreasonable or absurd consequences not contemplated by the legislature.” He also cited legal precedent holding that election laws “are to be given a liberal construction in favor of those seeking to hold office, in order that the public may have the benefit of choice from all those who are in fact and in law qualified.”

It has long been a core Ledger-Enquirer editorial principle that regardless of the particular qualities and qualifications of any officeholder or office seeker, a contested election is almost always a better prescription for good civic health than an uncontested one. In this election the circumstances that, in short order, reduced a field of candidates from five to one made the prospect of an uncontested race especially uncomfortable.

In that sense alone, with no pretense to any legal expertise on our part, we applaud a ruling that restores the choice to the voters.

Two things the decision does not address — because they were not legal issues before the court — are the unfortunate time lapse involved and the obvious communication problems involving candidate eligibility.

LaJoye and Tompkins are officially back in the race. But most voters probably learned that fact on Friday — the last day of early voting. Because neither now faces primary opposition that fact is effectively moot, but the implications under different circumstances are troublesome.

At least as troublesome is both candidates’ assurance that they had checked all the boxes and jumped through all the hoops, only to be told otherwise after the deadline — by being bounced from the ballot.

We’ll spare you the cliched “Cool Hand Luke” line. But it’s obvious that communication is seriously lacking in some of our political qualifying processes.

This story was originally published May 21, 2016 at 5:34 PM with the headline "Ruling puts challengers back on ballot."